Last Tuesday, I decided to attend the first honors colloquium of the year here at the University of Rhode Island. The colloquium’s theme this year is humor, and the speaker of the night was Patch Adams, an alternative medicinal clown who has spread laughter and healing throughout the world. I went alone to the event, because I remembered it last minute and couldn’t find anyone to go with. When I arrived at Edwards Hall, I was shocked at how many people were in the building, and I say ‘people’ instead of ‘students’ intentionally; the whole auditorium was filled with graduates, elderly couples, honors students in the colloquium class, and parents who lived in the area. I couldn’t find anywhere to sit, so I meandered my way through the crowd up to the balcony, where there was an open aisle seat next to an elderly couple and behind one of my honors professors. I gladly took it, and began to take in my surroundings.
The elderly woman to my left was very friendly. We weren’t sitting for very long before she asked me if I was a student, and about my major and current courses. After a few minutes of polite small talk, I made a remark about how many people had shown up. At that point the coordinators were encouraging people to watch the live broadcast from Swan Hall, one building over, because there were no more seats. She told me that she had heard about the colloquium in one of her classes. Probably in response to my puzzled look, she explained how she was part of OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, at URI. She said that the program was aimed towards adults 50 years of age or older who wanted to continue learning just to learn. It made sense to me then that there were so many older couples attending, and she said she recognized a few faces from previous classes.
That night, I went back to my dorm with a head full of new ideas. Not only did Patch Adams shake up my idea of the medical system in the US and prove that there is a higher meaning to life, but I kept thinking back to the OLLI program. I did a little research about the program the next day, and was amazed. They offer all types of courses, from Introduction to Watercolor to Surfing the Quantum World, and a membership fee is only $50.
I have often thought about why some adults stop learning after college. I use the word stop liberally; really people learn new things every day, but many adults don’t actively seek new intellectual challenges like students do. I realized that the woman I met at the honors colloquium is exactly the kind of learner I want to be now and in the future: I want to learn for fun. So many students get caught up in what author Ken Bain describes as ‘surface or strategic learning’: learning just to pass an exam or class and doing assignments just because they are assigned. Personally, I plan on doing quite the opposite. I want to get the most I can out of all of my classes in college, and I plan on making deeper connections between myself, the world, and what I can do to improve it. This is the best time in my life to develop my own thoughts and ideas, and to learn how to formulate actual schemas of the working world as a system, backed up by evidence.
In the book A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, one student, Cedric Jennings, finds his way out of an impoverished, violent, distraught, high school in downtown Washington DC and into Brown University. The book follows Cedric’s tale through emotional family trauma, financial hardships, and the social difficulties he perseveres through as first, the only kid trying to earn good grades in high school, and then as the only poor, inner-city black student at Brown. Cedric’s drive to get good grades and to get ahead is driven significantly by his upbringing: his mother always expecting hard work from him, and the church always giving him faith in God to pursue his dreams. Much like Cedric, I am feeling lost among the academic sea of college; there is so much I have yet to learn about the world that I barely know where to start. But unlike Cedric, I don’t want to learn just to do well in school, I want to learn so that I can apply new ideas to the real world. For me, learning is about concepts and understanding rather than facts and memorization, and I care more about taking academic risks than getting a perfect GPA.
As of right now, I am majoring in chemistry, but I am comfortable with the idea that my major will inevitably change or be tweaked. So far, I love my chemistry lectures and labs, but I’m also considering geochemistry and biochemistry and maybe even minoring in education... Although I know for sure that I don’t want to be a teacher right out of college, I may want to teach someday in the future. As for now, I’ll stick with the chemistry, even if the path is hard, because it provides me with a perfect intersection of my interests: math, science, and frustrating puzzles.
Last Tuesday, I decided to attend the first honors colloquium of the year here at the University of Rhode Island. The colloquium’s theme this year is humor, and the speaker of the night was Patch Adams, an alternative medicinal clown who has spread laughter and healing throughout the world. I went alone to the event, because I remembered it last minute and couldn’t find anyone to go with. When I arrived at Edwards Hall, I was shocked at how many people were in the building, and I say ‘people’ instead of ‘students’ intentionally; the whole auditorium was filled with graduates, elderly couples, honors students in the colloquium class, and parents who lived in the area. I couldn’t find anywhere to sit, so I meandered my way through the crowd up to the balcony, where there was an open aisle seat next to an elderly couple and behind one of my honors professors. I gladly took it, and began to take in my surroundings.
The elderly woman to my left was very friendly. We weren’t sitting for very long before she asked me if I was a student, and about my major and current courses. After a few minutes of polite small talk, I made a remark about how many people had shown up. At that point the coordinators were encouraging people to watch the live broadcast from Swan Hall, one building over, because there were no more seats. She told me that she had heard about the colloquium in one of her classes. Probably in response to my puzzled look, she explained how she was part of OLLI, the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, at URI. She said that the program was aimed towards adults 50 years of age or older who wanted to continue learning just to learn. It made sense to me then that there were so many older couples attending, and she said she recognized a few faces from previous classes.
That night, I went back to my dorm with a head full of new ideas. Not only did Patch Adams shake up my idea of the medical system in the US and prove that there is a higher meaning to life, but I kept thinking back to the OLLI program. I did a little research about the program the next day, and was amazed. They offer all types of courses, from Introduction to Watercolor to Surfing the Quantum World, and a membership fee is only $50.
I have often thought about why some adults stop learning after college. I use the word stop liberally; really people learn new things every day, but many adults don’t actively seek new intellectual challenges like students do. I realized that the woman I met at the honors colloquium is exactly the kind of learner I want to be now and in the future: I want to learn for fun. So many students get caught up in what author Ken Bain describes as ‘surface or strategic learning’: learning just to pass an exam or class and doing assignments just because they are assigned. Personally, I plan on doing quite the opposite. I want to get the most I can out of all of my classes in college, and I plan on making deeper connections between myself, the world, and what I can do to improve it. This is the best time in my life to develop my own thoughts and ideas, and to learn how to formulate actual schemas of the working world as a system, backed up by evidence.
In the book A Hope in the Unseen by Ron Suskind, one student, Cedric Jennings, finds his way out of an impoverished, violent, distraught, high school in downtown Washington DC and into Brown University. The book follows Cedric’s tale through emotional family trauma, financial hardships, and the social difficulties he perseveres through as first, the only kid trying to earn good grades in high school, and then as the only poor, inner-city black student at Brown. Cedric’s drive to get good grades and to get ahead is driven significantly by his upbringing: his mother always expecting hard work from him, and the church always giving him faith in God to pursue his dreams. Much like Cedric, I am feeling lost among the academic sea of college; there is so much I have yet to learn about the world that I barely know where to start. But unlike Cedric, I don’t want to learn just to do well in school, I want to learn so that I can apply new ideas to the real world. For me, learning is about concepts and understanding rather than facts and memorization, and I care more about taking academic risks than getting a perfect GPA.
As of right now, I am majoring in chemistry, but I am comfortable with the idea that my major will inevitably change or be tweaked. So far, I love my chemistry lectures and labs, but I’m also considering geochemistry and biochemistry and maybe even minoring in education... Although I know for sure that I don’t want to be a teacher right out of college, I may want to teach someday in the future. As for now, I’ll stick with the chemistry, even if the path is hard, because it provides me with a perfect intersection of my interests: math, science, and frustrating puzzles.